Cecilia is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Law of the University of Sussex. Through a socio-legal approach and a combination of doctrinal analysis and empirical methods, her research investigates laws, procedures and informal practices pertaining to the determination of the nationality status and country of origin of asylum-seekers in Europe. Within the broader subject of nationality status determination in the asylum procedure, Cecilia's research devotes particular attention to the identification of stateless asylum-seekers.

Cecilia holds a Bachelor’s degree (Università degli Studi, Milan, Italy) and a Master’s degree in Philosophy (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy), and specialised in Ethics and Political Philosophy. In 2010 she obtained a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Conflict Management from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy. Her dissertation focused on trafficking in persons in Tanzania and was based on an internship at the office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Dar es Salaam.

Before joining the University of Sussex as a doctoral researcher, Cecilia worked for several years in the field of migration in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She worked in refugee protection and statelessness prevention and eradication with different NGOs and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Egypt, Turkey, Italy and Guinea. Moreover, she conducted research on trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and contributed to the 2016 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons and the 2018 Global Study on Smuggling of Migrants.

Cecilia is affiliated to the Sussex Centre for Human Rights Research (SCHRR) and the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR).  She is an associate member of the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) and a member of the Global PhDs on Statelessness network (GPS), the Academy of Law and Migration (ADiM) and the Swiss Network of young Migration Scholars (SNyMS).